...books, books. Tall crates lined three walls of the room, filled beyond capacity. The excess had been piled in piles on the floor. There was little room to walk and no room to walk up and down. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay: J.D. Salinger, Franny, and ZooeyAs books pour into the room in this scene from J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, the theme of reading spills into nearly every aspect of the novel. There's so much reading done, in fact, that there's little room to move through the story without running into the subject. The two main characters, Franny and Zooey Glass, are often engaged in the act of reading. The narrator reconstructed the story by reading the different interpretations given by the characters in the story. But this novel is not just intrinsically about the act of reading; it also involves the reader in active reading. As readers of this novel, we become active participants in reading to fill some gaps, or indeterminacies, left by the author. As such, reader response criticism provides a means of understanding the novel's use of reading. According to Stanley Fish, an important feature of reader response criticism is that "reading is not a matter of discovering what the text means, but a process of experiencing what it does to you" (Eagleton 85). In Franny and Zooey, Franny reads The Way of the Pilgrim, a religious text that describes the act of praying incessantly. Because of her intense desire for enlightenment, Franny follows the book's instructions and prays constantly. Intellectually, Franny sees this intense desire for personal satisfaction as conflicting with her morals. He says, “Just because I'm picky about what I want — in this case, enlightenment or peace, instead of money, prestige, fame, or anything else — doesn't mean I'm not as selfish and selfish.” looking like everyone else" (Salinger 148). As a result, Franny has a nervous breakdown. Her need for religious answers informs the way she reads the text. She seeks instruction as she reads. On the other hand, Zooey, the brother of Franny, who also reads the work, does not read for instruction, but simply for information. Zooey describes the plot of the book to her mother, saying, "The purpose of both little books... is supposedly to wake everyone up." to the necessity and benefits of reciting the Jesus Prayer unceasingly" (Salinger 112). His interpretation is a fairly objective scholarly response to the book's agenda. It is obvious that he is not looking for a religious epiphany in the book. Reading it with a academic, Zooey experiences a totally different understanding of the text than Franny. This narrative supports the reader response concept that words have no meaning until they are read nothing but black marks on a white page. It had no impact on their lives, nothing more than a book in an unused room in a Manhattan apartment. Once read, those black marks evoked enough meaning to contribute to a mental breakdown. Although words receive meaning once read, this meaning is not necessarily a static interpretation. As Terry Eagleton wrote, “The process of reading…is always dynamic, a complex movement, and unfolds over time” (77). At the beginning of the second chapter of Franny and Zooey, we find Zooey in the bathtub, reading a letter from her brother Buddy the morning after Franny's nervous breakdown. It was a “long typed letter, four years old that… had beenobviously taken out of the envelope and opened and folded… [and] it was actually torn in several places" (Salinger 56). Zooey obviously read and reread this letter several times since she received it. According to Lois Tyson, the act of rereading "results in... [the] revision of our understanding of characters and events" (159) because each time we reread we bring different experiences to our interpretation of the text. In the letter to Zooey, Buddy attempts to explain the reasons why he and Seymour, Glass's older brother, chose to educate Franny and Zooey as they did Buddy wrote: "Dr. Suzuki says somewhere that to be in a state of pure consciousness - satori - means to be with God before saying, "Let there be light." Seymour and I thought it would be a good thing to withhold this light from you and Franny..., from the arts, from the sciences, from the classics, from the languages ​​- until both of you could at least conceive of a state of being in which the mind knows the source of all light" (Salinger 65). Franny's breakdown adds a new dimension to the meaning that Zooey has created from previous readings of this letter, thus allowing for a new interpretation of the letter's events and characters. While can only speculate what meaning Zooey ascribed to the letter before and after the collapse, what is significant is Zooey's act of reading, demonstrating that his "initial speculations generate[d] a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what [came] next might retrospectively transform [her] original understanding" (Eagleton 77). We find Zooey reading elsewhere in the novel as well. After she fails to coax Franny out of her depression , leaves her crying in the living room and heads into the room. once shared by Buddy and Seymour. There, surrounded by stacks of books, he reads quotes written on a wall by his brothers. Salinger describes reading as "...rather like walking through an emergency station set up in a flood zone..." (175). In a way, the quote wall is an emergency station for Zooey, a crisis hotline. After some reading, he picks up the private phone line in the bedroom and calls Franny, pretending to be Buddy, armed with new information to help him bond with her. It's also important to note that Zooey is an actor, and what is an actor first and foremost but a professional reader? Reading, then giving meaning to words, is a large part of what an actor does for a living. Then, through rehearsal, an actor's character becomes more authentic and more believable. Zooey, as an actor, is rehearsing in Buddy and Seymour's room. Its initial reading is a dress rehearsal; Zooey is trying to derive some sort of meaning to convey to her sister. Then, “with his hands… lowered to his forehead, Zooey sat… for a good twenty minutes” (Salinger 180). During these twenty minutes, Zooey goes over her lines, creating her character before trying to reach her sister again. Zooey recognizes that Buddy is the one who should talk to Franny. During her first attempt to talk to Franny, Zooey says, "I'm no damn good for this... should I try calling Buddy on the phone?" (Salinger 149). Zooey realizes that to make an impact on her sister, she needs to be more like Buddy. By reading Buddy's quotes, Zooey can play the part of her brother and, in turn, become "good for it." Franny and Zooey are not the only readers of the novel. Their older brother, Buddy, narrates the second section of Franny and Zooey and also serves as a reader of sorts. In an experiment conducted by reader response theorist David Bleich, he found that students writing an "objective" essay would focus on the same elements of thetext they would focus on if they wrote a personal response to the text (Tyson 167). Thus, “…even when we think we are writing traditional objective interpretations of literary texts, the sources of those interpretations lie in the personal responses evoked by the text” (Tyson 167). Buddy received portions of the text “in somewhat heartbreakingly private settings, from the same three player-characters” (Salinger 49). The "three player characters" are Buddy's brother, sister, and mother. Obviously he would have some sort of personal response to each of these three narrators. An objective reading of the text would, by extension, be impossible to prevent an objective narration. An indication of Buddy's subjectivity is found at the very end of the novel. During Zooey's phone call to Franny, Zooey finally says something that connects with her. In Buddy's words, for Franny it was "as if all that little or much wisdom there was in the world was suddenly hers... she seemed to know what to do next, too. She... went to bed. For a few minutes, before to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, she remained calm, smiling at the ceiling" (Salinger 201). Regardless of the narrator's personal feelings, this ending appears to be a happy one. Franny finds peace, her life can move forward. But we shouldn't forget that it was Buddy and Seymour who put Franny in this situation in the first place with the experimental religious education they implemented on Franny and Zooey. As a brother, Buddy needs to know that Franny broke out of her breakdown so he can live without the guilt of her mental death. Knowing this, a second reading of the final passage could be interpreted very differently. We are never told whether Franny will ever get out of bed again. Perhaps she has slipped further into her nervous breakdown, and the smile indicates that her body is no longer connected to her tormenting mental anguish. Buddy never specifically states what happened with Franny. To be sure, determinate versus indeterminate meaning is a common theme among critics of reader response. The gaps left by the author force the reader to actively participate in “building hypotheses about the meaning of the text” (Eagleton 76). Eagleton further states that "the text itself is really nothing more than a series of suggestions to the reader..." (76). Buddy is a reader within the text, receiving these cues in the form of conversations and letters with his family in “horribly spaced junctures” (Salinger 49). He then uses these different texts, not linearly, but cumulatively, to "build the language into meaning." His most recent understanding of events is what we read in the novel Franny and Zooey. As readers, we go through the same cumulative meaning-making process to understand the novel. “We read forward and backward simultaneously, anticipating and remembering” (Eagleton 77). We first learn about the members of the Glass family through a footnote at the beginning of Buddy's narrative. At this point we have no other references with which to understand these characters. As the book unfolds and we learn more about the characters, we must return to that footnote to fill in the blanks created by our continued reading of the text. The footnote details could have easily been included in the text, but by making the passage a footnote it is quite easy to find and refer to it again. This indicates that the author is aware that reading is a “complex movement that takes place over time” (Eagleton 77) and that he expects us to want to return to this passage. This suggests that stylistically Salinger is attempting to promote active reading. As Franny and Zooey unfolds..1999.